By Alexander Cheves | @badalexcheves
Carmen Electro, the Finnish, Berlin-based vinyl DJ and producer, walks into our interview wearing a red leather jacket. I tell her she looks like she’s in a 90s spy thriller.
Her debut release, Viviane—out on SEVEN, named for her best friend—landed last year. It sits between house and techno, warmer and more melodic than she’d originally planned it to be. Since then, she’s been fully focused on production. “I have so many tracks. I need to get over myself and start releasing them,” she says.
We’ve met many times before. In past meetings, she’s always seemed very confident, so I’m surprised at her slight nervousness.
“I’m in the middle of moving,” she says. It’s not nervousness, just stress. She found a new apartment in Berlin and is in the slow process of moving her stuff. Even so, she’s energised.
As the founder of KUJE Records in Berlin, Carmen Electro is busy. She travels a lot and plays regularly at Tresor, Säule, Bassiani, RSO, and Radion, among other legendary clubs. I know going into this interview that she has a meticulous, highly professional approach to vinyl, and I’m eager to learn what she has to say. I dive in.
What first drew you to Berlin?
Carmen Electro was born in Finland, then moved to the U.S. for boarding school at seventeen, and then to London to study fashion.
“I discovered underground techno in London,” she says. “A couple of years later, that led me to Berlin.”
“All roads in techno lead to Berlin, especially once you invest a certain amount of passion and focus into electronic music. Eventually you get here.”
She’s been in the city for over ten years and still loves it. This love of Berlin causes, she admits, some tension. Some of her best friends and even her boyfriend do not see themselves living in this city forever, but she does.
“I’ll travel more in winter and find somewhere warmer to write music. But a flat in Berlin? Always, forever.”
A lot of Berliners have a hard time sustaining that love—clubland takes its toll on everyone. How does she sustain it?
“I love this city as much as I did in the beginning because my life would be so different if I hadn’t come here.”
“I would not be living my truth as authentically as I am if it wasn’t for this city.”
How did fashion lead to music?
As a teenager in Finland, she often made her own clothes. She thought it was the fashion element she loved, but now she thinks it was just the art of making something.
“In hindsight, I see I was always really into craftsmanship and doing something with my hands,” she says. “At the time, fashion was the medium through which this need expressed itself.”
Fashion school “cured her” of the industry, she says. Long hours, no pay, and “the way people treated each other,” she says, was “not something I aspired to.”
At the same time, during a fashion internship in London, she started going to techno parties.
“Back then, the people you met in a club were there because they had a strong passion for this music, since it wasn’t so easy to find then. This was when you were into techno because you found it in a rabbit hole on the internet.”
From those first clubbing experiences, her mind for craftsmanship found a new medium.
“Playing vinyl is something you can touch. It’s an art. With a vinyl record, someone put a lot of time into doing this, and a lot of money.” And playing did not come easy: “I was so shit at playing records in the beginning, but I was immediately hooked.”
How did you start DJing?
For a long time, her practice was just at home. “I was collecting music and had a turntable, and then I had another one.” She practised and practised.
After a while, she says—after she knew her music was good—she felt “guilty” for not sharing it.
“I was spending so much time at the club, bringing a lot to it, and it gave me a lot. At some point, I felt I needed to justify this time. I was ready to play.”
Then COVID happened, and she had nothing to do but mix.
“I spent the pandemic just mixing, mixing, mixing,” he says.
Then she joined Distinkt agency, and they were able to give her a steady flow of gigs.
She shrugs. “It wasn’t a dramatic thing,” she says. “I got an agency. They liked my sound. I got gigs. I put in the work. That’s how it happened.”
I know you have thoughts about being a woman in the boys’ club of nightlife.
She nods—I sense she’s gearing up for a fight, but when she speaks, she’s kind. “It almost seems stupid to keep talking about this. It’s just a fact. Women don’t get the same kinds of gigs men get. There’s still this idea that women aren’t as good as men. That’s it. Everyone sees it. It’s real.”
And it’s infuriating, she says.
“This feels like it chose me. I didn’t choose it. Why does it matter that I’m a woman or how I look? My focus has always just been on the music.”
When she first started going to clubs, “around thirteen years ago, there were literally no female DJs. So at first, this was not something I aspired to do. I didn’t know I could.”
She believes women going to clubs today would reasonably think the same thing.
“It’s bad,” she says. “The pandemic was good in that it kind of forced us to look at the statistics and look at all this. Afterwards, there was a lot of effort to diversify lineups.”
But then something happened, she says. In that “diversity” effort:
“Any FLINTA* would get put on a lineup because they needed one. It was tokenism. Obviously, if you put someone on who’s barely touched the decks but has the right genitals, they won’t deliver a good set, and then it enforces, again, this idea that women can’t mix.”
The statistics have started moving backwards.
“The structures haven’t changed. The festivals and clubs are still owned by the same people. And the people are not talking about women and diversity so much anymore. Everyone’s sliding back.”
She says there is “so much talent” that is not being heard. “It’s a shame that the existing structures are standing as strong as they are. Because nightlife should be a space where things get challenged and change for the better.”
What does “underground” mean to you now?
She runs KUJE Records, which has a focus on dance music from international talent, specifically producers who don’t have easy physical access to the scene through record shops or parties. The word “underground” appears in the press materials.
She has complicated feelings about the word, actually.
“Underground is a loaded term,” she says. “Often this term is being used for marketing purposes by bigger brands and more commercial initiatives. Honestly, I feel like for something to be underground, you can’t call yourself underground. Underground has to be anti-establishment. It has to be DIY.”
She knows the contradiction. She has a booking agent, a label, and a career.
“We exist in capitalism. Even for an artist my size, I’m not so small now that I’m completely underground. But compare me to Rosalia and I’m underground as fuck.”
The values of underground music culture, she says, are what she can stand behind and what she keeps alive in KUJE Records.
“Underground means doing things because you believe in it, not because of external expectations.”
Where do you like to dig for vinyl in Berlin?
Hardwax, arguably Berlin’s most iconic record shop for techno, is a place she checks every week—their techno curation, she says, is “precise enough that I trust it for new releases.” But every now and then, she gets a surprise from Audio-In.
She tells me that, when digging, timing matters.
Like at Audio-In, the beloved Friedrichschain mainstay for vinyl collectors: “They usually get the new load on Thursday evening. So when they open at midday on Friday, people are queuing up. People queue before they open.”
She also goes for the 3-euro crates. “They’re enormous, full of chaos,” she says. “There is a lot of crap in there, but I’ve found some really sick records for three euros, which is always nice.”
House records, she notes, are a different financial animal. Her boyfriend sends her music he digs up—he’s more of a house guy—and, for fun, she’ll look up its retail cost online. “It will literally be something like 150 euros, 250 euros,” she says. “I’m like, babe, your taste is way too expensive.”
What has playing vinyl in clubs taught you?
She shares some technical knowledge because, she says, most people—including a lot of label owners—simply don’t know it.
The number of minutes of music per side of a record directly affects how loud it will sound in a club.
“There is a limit of, I’d say, eleven to thirteen minutes of music per side that means the groove is able to be cut deep enough for it to be loud enough. If you go above thirteen minutes, the grooves get so close that they’re not deep anymore, so the sound is not booming. I don’t buy those records.”
A record with three or four tracks per side will be thin and powerless, no matter how good the music is, so she rarely buys them.
She shares more knowledge. Marbled, mixed-colour vinyl loses around five per cent in sound quality, she estimates. And in terms of ease for playing in a club—in the ability to physically see the grooves under dim light in a DJ booth—”Black is the best,” she says. “Dark red is okay. Dark blue is okay.”
Is nightlife changing in any ways that concern you?
“There’s a lot of talk about this egocentricness in nightlife now. The focus is so heavily on the DJ, and the DJ has become like a god,” she says. “These people are pushing music, but potentially don’t even stand behind that music.”
She says the celebrity culture, in part thanks to platforms like Instagram, forming around nightlife and DJs has created a situation where artists are releasing “hype music,” which she suspects even they don’t love. But because they’re famous, the music gets deemed cool and current, and then everyone’s listening to music made for the algorithm, and the scene gets awash with bland, formulaic sounds.
“We have created this wheel of music that is being played which nobody likes, not even the artists or the audience. Nobody says anything because these ‘cool’ people play it, so it must be good.”
How do you know when you’ve connected with a crowd?
She says her music doesn’t result in obvious signals. No hands in the air, no screaming.
“Sometimes people are just grooved in. I can see that nobody is leaving the dancefloor and they’re focused.”
She builds toward a specific point in every set.
“Once I enter the flow state, it lets me almost open my third eye and I can feel them. That’s the point after which I feel I can play any record and their minds are open to it.”
I know you are a spiritual person. Tell me more about that.
She’s a yogi. She had a silent retreat booked for the following weekend—cancelled because of the move. She wants to go to Buddhist monasteries and talk to the monks.
She’s serious. “I need to ask them some questions.”
One question she wants to ask: How do you stay passionately devoted to something without your ego being attached to the outcome?
“I love music so much. Because I love it, I want to get my music to all these people, because I love them, too. But at the same time, I should not attach ego to it. Buddhism says we should separate ourselves from the ego, because it only wants more and will never be satisfied. How does one feel passionately about something without being egoistic?”
She suspects the monks will tell her something she can’t quite live out inside a music career.
“I think Buddhist teachings are impossible to live by in the society we actually live in,” she says. “I would be curious to see what they say.”
She recognises that this might clash with the image others have of her, but she tells me her spiritual practice is fully rooted in music.
“Dancing is an active meditation. When the music is good, you’re just enjoying it. You’re not talking to people around you. You are present.”
She laughs at herself here: “Honestly, I get so into spiritual stuff that I have to control how much I say,” she says.
“I’d be a great cult leader.”
We laugh at this, but then, speaking sincerely, she says she believes the rise in popularity and interest in club culture reflects a spiritual vacuum—a generation of people looking for the kind of collective spiritual experiences once supplied by organised religion.
“We don’t have religion anymore. Capitalism gives you very little to believe in. Buying stuff doesn’t give me any dopamine,” she says. “But music is different. Music still gives you answers to the big questions of life. And those are the questions I’m most interested in asking.” ★
Follow Carmen Electro at @carmenelectro on Instagram and on SoundCloud. Find Kuje Records on Instagram.
Words: Alexander Cheves
Images: Mara Menzel, with additional photos courtesy of the artist
